Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, my name is David Theroux, and I'm the president of the independent Institute
We're especially delighted to welcome you to this
Evening our special program is entitled the meaning and reality of individual sovereignty
with a renowned scholar and best-selling author
Jordan B. Peterson
For those of you who may be new to the independent Institute, you'll find information on us in the printed program that hopefully you received
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Within just a couple years Jordan Peterson has taken the world by storm
Indeed he's become a profound and powerful phenomenon in the midst of the cultural confusion of our age a
A courageous articulate and sparkling champion of free speech
individual liberty personal responsibility
Free markets civic virtue the rule of law and the judeo-christian values that underpin Western civilization
Dr. Peterson has burst onto the public scene with his incisive critiques of political correctness
identity politics
moral relativism
post-modernism and
collectivism and statism on the left and right
Here's just a sampling of the many memorable quotes by him quote
Don't compare yourself with other people
compare yourself with who you were yesterday unquote or
Free speech is not just another value is the foundation of Western civilization
Don't lie about ANYTHING, EVER. lying leads to hell
We have to rediscover the eternal values that... and then live them out
No one gets away with anything ever
So take responsibility for your own life
Now what is remarkable is that such common sense and enduring wisdom
Has been so sadly lacking in the public square
But what is also so astounding and encouraging
is the enormous interest Dr. Peterson is generating globally in restoring first principles
Author the number 1 international bestseller 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos
Jordan Peterson is professor of psychology at the University of Toronto
He is also author of the book maps of meaning the architecture of belief
Plus over 100 scientific papers and he has almost 2 million subscribers to his YouTube channel
His work explores the modern world by combining the hard-won truths of ancient tradition
With the stunning revelations of cutting-edge science
now you can read further details about his background on the program that hopefully you got
But I will just add one additional
note
He's a native of North Western Canada
(in) 2016 he was inducted as an honorary member of the quack-e-to-tell tribe in the Pacific Northwest and
given the name alestalagie
meaning great seeker
Please join me in welcoming Jordan B Peterson
Well, thank you all for coming. it's good to see you here
The meaning and reality of individual sovereignty
That's a fundamental question as far as I'm concerned
Because it's by no means
self-evident
Why?
the idea of individual sovereignty should be
granted the
primacy of place that it
Has been granted or you could say it another way the
The reasons that that proposition have been deemed self-evident are not obvious
so
When I was just backstage, I was looking at the Declaration of Independence, which I do quite regularly make sure that I've got that
especially the introductory
Statements formulated properly and the introductory statements. I won't quote them precisely but
They lay out a series of propositions
And the first is that we hold these truths to be self-evident
and that people are
endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that
they're equal and that
Government is to govern bike by the consent of individuals and
Those are axiomatic statements, right?
There are this sort of statements that you build a system from you have to accept the statements first before you can build the system
And it's analogous in some sense to Euclidean geometry, right? There's a
Set of axioms and you accept them and then you can build a system, but you have to accept the axioms
But you don't have to accept the axioms. That's the thing and one of the things that's very much worth understanding is that
the current culture war that we're
Embroiled in which really has been going on for in some ways
For thousands of years, but in other ways for
More specifically political ways. I suppose since the rise of Marxism about a hundred and fifty years ago
It depends on how you analyze it whether you think about it as political or psychological because as a psychological phenomena, it's much older
The the proposition that
Those truths that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence are self-evident is
No longer accepted by a large number of people
Let's say in the intellectual academy and I would say that's particularly true of the post modernists. It's also true of the
Marxists and
the post modernists and the Marxists have
United in a very strange
manner because their
Philosophies are not really commensurate with one another the post modernists profess
Skepticism about meta-narratives
large-scale stories that perhaps might
Might serve as uniting
structures for people's own cognitive
Contents but also that unite
groups of people across large swaths of territory they profess
skepticism about the validity of those narratives and yet
well, the problem with that is it leaves you nowhere because if you don't have a
Uniting narrative a uniting story of uniting ethos. You don't have an explanation for
Your existence in the world and you don't have a direction
And that's not helpful
Because you can't live without an explanation for your existence in the world and a direction or if you do live under those conditions
You're bound to be miserable. And the reason you're bound to be miserable is because
And I would say that this is technically true
That almost all the positive emotion that you're going to experience in your life is a consequence of pursuing valuable goals
It's not a consequence of attaining them
It's a consequence of positing them
aiming at them and then observing yourself moving towards them and that... the sense that
accompanies that and we know the neurobiology of this sense actually quite well. the sense of that is one of
Forward movement and engagement and meaning and accomplishment. It's something like that
Hope that's another way of thinking about it. And it's the antidote in some sense to the
flip side of life which is the fact that it's
nasty brutish and short
as Thomas Hobbes put it
And that's inalienable as well
there's no escape from the
limitations and suffering of life
And so in order for that not to become overwhelming and then that can easily become overwhelming and often does in people's lives
Then you need a countervailing
Set of propositions that you can act out and embody
to endow that-
Limitation with worth and that's a not a trivial
Problem. I was just debating... Not really
Slavoj Žižek
about a week ago and
two weeks ago maybe and I was debating him because he had been advertised to me and
many others as sort of the world's foremost Marxist scholar and it turned out that
He really was not much of a Marxist at all. And so I ended up criticizing the communist manifesto
which
Deserves criticism and and then I expected him to defend
it but he didn't and so that was
Sort of
Interesting but non blessing um
But he said something very interesting during that debate and it came all of a sudden it came out of the blue, you know
And I think it was the most
striking part of the entire discussion
And then this is just a strange segue, but I'm trying I want to I need to
Discuss this because it struck me so hard because I think it's such an important point
I'd never thought about it before so he told me something I'd never thought about before at all
He was talking about the Christian passion
and he said that his
Sense was that the most important part of it was
The scene let's say where Christ is crucified and cries out to God that he's been Forsaken
And he said look you gotta think about what that means. I'm paraphrasing him. He said that
the suffering that characterizes individual human life is so intense that even if God Himself
Dane's to undergo it it will test his faith to the point where he will not believe in his own existence
That's really something and I thought wow, that's such a brilliant. That's such a brilliant observation. Is that
Because it's definitely the case, you know, if you if you if you interact with people in any manner, that's the least bit
Below the surface you find out that most people are carrying
A relatively heavy existential burden of one form or another, you know, I mean most people
many people have a physical illness that they're dealing with or a mental illness that they're dealing with and if
You're in a fortunate position where you're not dealing with either of those you probably have a family member that does and if you don't
have either of those you will that's for sure and
And you know, that's just one of many
terrible catastrophes that are
certain to visit you and
That
terrible catastrophe is
A challenge to us in many ways. It's a challenge to us because it forces us to look
deeply for a countervailing meaning that can make sense out of that and then maybe more than makes sense out of it and
And so I've been curious about whether or not that countervailing meaning exists, you know the post modernists
The first thing about them especially the identity politics types
I never know really what to call this group of people because if I call them postmodern
Neo-marxists then I'm accused of being alt right conspiracy theorists and if if I if I call them
Collectivists well that's accurate in some sense
But not not precisely and I could call them identity politics players and that happens on the right and the left but that's the basic
Rubric, I would say that uniting
Idea is that the individual is that... the individual's a fiction
in some sense and the right level of analysis
for...
Society and the political scene and and the economic scene is the group right is
Who you are as an individual is well, first of all, perhaps that's just an illusory category altogether
But who you are is going to be defined
essentially in terms of your group identity
your gender
Your sex that's already 70 different things
Your your that'd be funny if it wasn't true
Your your
Maybe your socioeconomic status your class. That was the original Marxist
Definition of identity right because Marx believed that history was a war between two classes and that your fundamental
Being was established by your class identity
Or it's your
Ethnicity or your race? Those are two other
Fundamental group identities or it's some combination of them all which is
Intersectionality, which is something that sort of devours itself and I've done a little bit of mathematics
It's like if you could imagine that you belong to ten groups, you know ten canonical groups
there's probably like one of you and so if you get intersectional enough
one of the things that happens is that you break the group's all the way down to the level of the individual if you're gonna
take
someone's
group centered peculiarities entirely into account you end up with ends of one and
I actually think that that's what the West figured out thousands of years ago was that if you were gonna take everyone's
Uniqueness into account in the way the intersectionalists appear to want to do with the plethora of group
identities that you end up at the individual and so
But it but there's no
requirement for coherency on the part of the postmodernists and in fact
They believe that coherency is actually I would say something akin to a conspiracy theory. That's part
I'm dead serious. I'm absolutely dead serious about this. It's a it's a conspiracy theory on the part of
the modernists who invented or elaborated the oppressive
Patriarchy that we all exist under which is something akin, I suppose to Marx's
Proletariat versus Bourgeoisie, it's some mishmash of idiocy like that and
But you know, I mean it's there's a question there that that's worth
Answering it's like well
Why do we believe in the individual?
You know the founders of the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence know it's like they justified it
Right. They said we hold these truths as self-evident like that's not an argument
That's just a statement. It's like and it starts a statement like a game in some sense
It's like well, let's assume these things are true and move on from there and see what happens now
They had their reasons, you know, like from a Canadian perspective
The people who
The Americ... you Americans who
Ran a revolution against England. You're just Englishmen that we're after their own rights and and
And had been denied by by
By your colonial status, but the American system is deeply embedded in the English common law system, and it's deeply embedded in
Well, whatever gave rise to the English common law system and certainly part of that is
the Judeo-Christian tradition
I don't I don't think any of that's particularly debatable and and so I've been very interested in what makes these propositions
self-evident
to look to see if there's any truth in the
sub structure that makes
For the self evidence and so I'm gonna lay out some propositions
For you today. We'll see how many I can get to
As there's a number of them that are important
I think I'll start first of all with a little discussion of Genesis
I did a biblical series in 2017
on Genesis which some of you might be interested in either watching or listening to. it's actually being very popular
Which is very peculiar
I rented a theater of about this size to give the lectures and it sold out
15 lectures on Genesis and almost all the people who came were men
which is completely incomprehensible because you can't get men near a church and
you know and and they were usually men and I would say between about 28 and
40 25 and 40 something like that
and so it was pretty interesting that they came and the most popular lecture I ever gave on YouTube is
On the first sentence of Genesis. It's like two and a half hours on the first sentence of Genesis
You never think anything like that could possibly be popular
but I want to tell you a little bit about Genesis because I think it's I think there are things in it that are
Well, they're what make the self evidence self-evident, but I also think that
They're also true. They're true metaphorically for sure. They're true psychologically.
I believe and they might be true metaphysically, but I don't know because no one knows about that and
you know, that's where you're
When you're speaking of ultimate things your knowledge runs out and so but I'll stick to the metaphorical and the psychological
That'll do you know
so
The way Genesis is structured. It's quite interesting. There's three elements
That are discussed as
Constituting the being
It's not
It's not a theory of the material existence like a scientific theory. It's not that it's a theory of being so it it's
And that's a hard thing to understand in itself. You could think about it as a theory of the structure of experience
That's another way of thinking about it. You know, you have experience of the world and
You have your emotions and your motivations and you have your aims and your stories and your thoughts your there's a characteristic human mode of
existence
That's conscious. We're aware that things exist and
We we live within that
structure and as far as I can tell
Given that Genesis is certainly not a scientific account of the structure of the Universe. It has to be some account of some other
Of something else and it's it's an account of experience itself and maybe experience itself is the ultimate reality
And it depends to some degree on how you define ultimate
It depends also on how you define reality, but you can play that game
You can say well, let's assume that it's just that your experience is reality. It's certainly reality as far as you're concerned
I mean especially and I would say one of the things about that that make that
Self-evident is pain
Like there's there's nothing like pain to convince you that your experience is real
I don't know anyone who isn't
convinced that their experience is real by pain and the only people I know that might be
Unconvinced just haven't had enough pain because if they did they'd be convinced. There's no arguing it away
in Genesis, there's God and
It's God the Father which applies something like a structure, you know
Like like a patriarchal structure that that might be one way of thinking about like a hierarchical structure
It's not surprising because God would be at the pinnacle of the hierarchy and there's the logos which is the word that
God uses to
Create order out of chaos. And so there's God and there's the logos
That's the Word of God and then there's the chaos and the chaos is Tohu wa-bohu
, or Tehom? Those are the original words and they're
They're uh...derived from older words from Sumeria
from a word
Tiamat and
Tiamat or Tiamat was a Sumerian goddess a dragon like a subterranean
No, no Fiddian
monster
Who lived in the salt water or who was the salt water? It's not exactly clear and she was
taken apart by the Sumerian
Creator god Marduk, who was a hero type like Beowulf or like Bilbo in in in in The Hobbit
Its Bilbo in The Hobbit isn't or is Frodo doesn't matter. It's one of those little hobbits anyways
and
he
He confronts Tiamat who has decided in the justify of bull fit of anger in some sense
I'll tell you the whole story Tiamat
there's two gods Tiamat and Abzu
Tiamat is the goddess of the salt water and Abzu is the goddess of the fresh water. And as far as the Sumerians were concerned
There was the land and underneath the land. There was fresh water and underneath the fresh water
There was salt water and the world was a dome on top of that and that was the same
conceptual world that the people who wrote
Genesis lived in and it's it's kind of how the world looks if you go outside in the field looks like there's a dome
There's some ground if you dig down you hit salt water or fresh water and then you know surrounding that
There's salt water. And so that's the world and they thought of the salt water in the fresh water as God and Goddess
Salt water being the goddess
Fresh water being the God and then it was the union of Azbu and Tiamat produced
The first generation of children gods and they were
Active
sort of proto-human creatures greater than human but
Human-like and they made an awful lot of racket and they were very careless and they killed Abzu
and
Then they tried to make their abode on his corpse. That's a very smart idea
Abzu you could think about him the representation of the patriarchy, you know
society itself and the idea that the Mesopotamians came up with in this
mystical dramatic way was that
We're careless
we tend to kill our society and we try to live on its corpse
And that's exactly right and it's always been right and that's then that that stories thousands of years old and it was a
foundation story for a very sophisticated
civilization and it still affects the stories that we live by today and it's a brilliant idea because of course you were handed your
society and you know
you may be
Doing everything you can to derive as much benefit as you possibly can from it without contributing it to it in the least
and so it's it's something dead in that it's the past and it's something that you can you can
Mmm, what would you say?
It's not manipulate precisely you can exploit
That's your privilege
How to exploit or exploitation anyways, they kill Abzu stupidly and that makes Tiamat very mad
And so she comes back and says well, I'm just wipe you all out. It's like the flood
It's it's the same kind of story as Noah and the flood, which is also a very common kind of story
And this new God comes up
His name is Marduk. And he has eyes all the way around his head and he speaks magic words both of which are very important
features because the fact that he has eyes all the way around his head means he pays attention and
the the fact that he speaks magic words means that he's a master of communication and he goes out to
Fight Tiamat and he successfully cuts her into pieces and he makes the world
and
so she's the goddess of chaos and destruction the goddess of nature and the idea is that
That entity that confronts the chaotic unknown cuts it into pieces and makes the habitable world
Which is exactly right. It's exactly right. It's exactly what you do
And then that's what I want to get at if I can get to it
It's hard. It's a hard story to tell anyways, that story is at the bottom of the story of Genesis. And so God
confronts the Tohu-wa bohu or the tehom with logos and
And logos gets elaborated over the course of centuries into a very complex idea
First of all logos is or turns into Christ, which is very strange thing. So there's the Christ in Christianity
Who's there at the beginning of time and then is incarnated in history
And is there at the end of time it's a very strange notion
So something that's eternal and is always there but also incarnated in a specific time and at a specific
arbitrary place, right
So it's this principle that is also so it's Universal and eternal and also local
Both at the same time very very important idea and very much relevant to what a human being is like as far as I'm concerned
And God uses the logos
the word and he interacts with the Tohu-wa bohu the chaos and
He generates order and that's what happens in Genesis, and he generates order over a number of days
using the logos and every time he generates a new form of order so each day he says
And it was good
And so that's interesting eh because
First of all, it's not obvious that it's good
that goes back to the
comment that Slavoj Zizek made it's like
Here we are in this being that's being
Being constructed in this reality and it's very it's very difficult reality
Human beings are very for us Our lives are bounded limited. We're mortal we suffer and
If we suffer enough
injustice
Or justice, even sometimes if we suffer enough
It's very easy for us to turn against
being and to curse it and it's not surprising and this is why she Zizek's words hit me so so hard because
when he said that that
suffering could become so intense that even God himself would have doubts about
The
Benevolence of himself in some sense. That's what that moment means on the cross
It's like well what in the world would you expect from mere human beings?
and so
But there's this insistence in Genesis that things that are created as a consequence of the logos are good
So first that they're created by the logos and second that they're good and so that's a very interesting set of propositions
so the logos is true is something like truthful speech and
So, this is partly what makes me a free speech advocate
Because I don't think that you can get to truthful speech without like speeches and speeches
dialogical
what you don't know much and you don't know much and neither do you like we're full of biases and we and and
Blind spots and even when you're trying to formulate your thoughts clearly, you're not that good at it
Especially if you're thinking about something complex and chaotic and unknown and you're gonna have to stumble around
Madly and make all sorts of mistakes to make any progress at all and with any luck, you know
You'll be able to talk to other people and they'll be just as clueless about it as you but out of that
Dialogical process if you're actually trying to communicate something
approximating the truth will emerge and
Hopefully the truth will set us free as its supposed to and put us on the proper path
You see the thing about the collectivist types at the universities, you know, they're they're very interested in shutting down free speech
But you have to understand that it's not because they oppose the views of the people
That they're trying to shut down
It is that but it's cuz they don't believe that there's such a thing as free speech
Because they don't believe that there's such a thing as individuals
They believe that you're just the avatar of your group and that whatever your opinions are are
conditioned
socially constructed and the reason they're socially constructed is because
you're born in a certain hierarchy of
identity and
That hierarchy of identity has conditioned every single thing you say so you might think that you're expressing your opinion
but if you're a postmodernist, you don't have an opinion because there isn't a you
You're just the mouthpiece of your privilege or your lack of privilege. And so
The debate on campuses isn't about who should speak and who shouldn't speak. Although it does degenerate into that
the debate is way more fundamental than that and it is well whether
There is anyone who has anything to say
because the
battleground for the post modernists is nothing but identity groups at war with one another
For dominance and that's it. And so
this
War is way deeper than you think it's not who should speak. It's whether
There is such a thing as free speech. All right, so back to human beings. I
I might manage this
So
It's an amazing idea first of all that it's this capacity for cumulative
For speech and and for attention because I think the logos is a combination of that like Marduk
you know Marduk has all his eyes and he's able to speak magic words and
So and he's one source of the idea for what the logo says another source is there's an Egyptian source
It's often identified with Christ as a god named Horus and you all know about Horus because you all know about the Egyptian eye
You've all seen the famous Egyptian eye
And Horus is the god of attention and
He's often identified with a falcon and or a bird of prey and that's because the only creatures that can see better than human beings are
birds of prey so Eagles for example Bald Eagles
They have an eye the same size as ours and they have two central, you know
Use your central vision to look at things because you know, if you look right at someone you notice you can see them
But you can't really see the people off to the side they start to fade out
You have a foe via in the middle of your eye, which is very very high resolution. But
Eagles have two of those and so they can see better than us
Eagle can see a dime from the top of the Empire State Building. Although why an eagle would be interested in that isn't obvious to me
But that's the acuity of their vision. Anyways, the Egyptians
one of the Egyptians gods that was identified with the Pharaoh and
therefore was sovereignty was Horus and it was Horus's eye in particular his eye his capacity to pay attention that
made him part of what constituted sovereignty so there's this idea that
complicated idea that you have to pull out of multiple sources that
The capacity to pay attention and the capacity to speak truthfully
takes chaos and transforms it into order into into cosmos and that that order is good and
So that so that's the second part of the the proposition. It's a very interesting It's a daring proposition
the first proposition is something like
consciousness communicative consciousness interacts with
The underlying chaotic structure of reality and brings
existence into being
Now we don't really know if that's true
There are physicists who suspect that. It's true. We know that who suspect that without consciousness
whatever consciousness is there'd be nothing but
something like a vague potential that it requires consciousness to
bring structured to that potential to make
existence
Exist and people argue about that. No one's exactly sure what it means but
But there are physicists who believe that very strongly
and
Well, and it's definitely
An open question, for example
The... an open question of what it is that could exist if there was nothing conscious of its existence
Now, I don't ...
Existence seems to be one of those things that requires consciousness to be it's like no consciousness. Well, what is there?
Well, it's not even it's not possible answer. There's no duration. There's no size. There's no quality. There's there's there's nothing
And it's a mystery. It's I'm not saying it's a mystery
we understand but implicit in the idea of existence consciousness seems to be implicit in the idea of existence and
it does seem that we're conscious
and so
Consciousness interacts with chaos to produce order and if it's truthful and attentive consciousness
Then the order it produces from chaos is good. That's the next proposition and that's a daring proposition
It's an ethical proposition. So the first proposition in Genesis is like an ontological or epistemological
Proposition it's sort of about the nature of reality
but the second is an ethical proposition and it's a really interesting one and I
Think this is this is I don't know if there's a more interesting question that you can ask yourself
it's like
Because the proposition is that what you bring into the world when you interact with chaos?
what is brought into the world in the interaction with chaos as a
consequence of truth if that's what's embodied in the logos is by definition good and
so one of the things I've been suggesting to my audiences, it's one of the rules in my book is that
You should tell the truth or at least you shouldn't lie
It's like you can't tell the truth because what the hell do you know, but but you cannot lie
You know
Like each of us knows when we're about to utter something that isn't true
now sometimes maybe you're confused about it because you're ignorant and you're biased and and
so
You say something and it might be true
It might not be but you know it clear about it
but sometimes it's pretty damn clear that you say something or
You do something that you know perfectly well not to be true and you do it anyways
and the proposition that Genesis puts forward is
If you act in truth then the order you produce is good
regardless of how it appears
it's an axiomatic statement of
ethical it's an axiomatic ethical proposition that you're
that the job of
Whatever extracts order from chaos
Is
properly done if it's done in truth and
that's
That's worth thinking about because it might be true. And then the question is like well, do you believe it's true?
That's a good question
it's not a religious question even it's a practical question as far as I'm concerned and my sense is that people just
Believe that this is true
deeply and
The way you can tell that is not by what they say
but by what they do and so for example, one of the things that you might observe is that
You know if you love someone
your children, let's say
You don't tell them that's the best way to get through the world is to lie about everything all the time. You don't sit down
You don't sit them down and say look
this is a corrupt Enterprise and
All together and you can't trust anyone because they're always lying about everything and your job is to become the best
liar, you possibly can become because that's the way to
Get to where you need to get to and to set the world straight
no one ever does that
And so if they don't do that, which would be belief in the lie, then they must assume something. That's approximately
Opposite and I would say that most people are not-
Pleased
When they catch their children in a lie, and so then you have to ask well, why is that?
it has to be because people believe that the truth is the proper way to proceed and it isn't obvious why they believe that
but it's obvious that they act as if they do believe that and then I would also say
Well, there's more to it than that because we know for example that
Societies that have a high level of trust and there aren't that many of those in the world
They happen to almost all be Western societies
Where there's a high level of trust there's a high level of economic development
They're unbelievably highly associated and I've never been able to figure out how countries ever became
Not corrupt, like it just seems completely impossible to me for countries that were corrupt once to ever become not corrupt
I don't understand how that happens at all but there's a handful of countries in the world that are
Fundamentally not corrupt where your default pri... proposition
presupposition when you deal with a stranger
let's say in a financial transaction is that you don't have to be on guard like you're
investigating a pit of vipers
Because the person is likely to act out what they say they'll do and it it reduces the transaction the unnecessary
Transaction costs to about zero right? Because I can take you at your word
We don't know each other. I can take you at your word a good example
That is eBay
You know because eBay was stranger transactions and people were concerned
It would degenerate into an unplayable game and turned out that the default
trade on eBay was like if you have
98% seller rating on eBay you're actually a crook, you know
You need you need ninety-nine percent or above? It's so high. It's unbelievable. So
So we do we do know that trust is
Necessary. We do assume that people shouldn't lie. We are upset if our children don't tell the truth
We feel that that's a moral failing, but we're not very courageous
Because we won't live the full
We won't live out the full
implications of that
so the third part of Genesis
that I'd like to concentrate on very briefly is the
part that makes the
Declaration of Independence
Self-evident and that is that man and woman alike are made in the image of God
And that's a very mysterious statement because well first of all, it seems on the face of it absurd
Partly because it turns God into something approximating a person
Because there's an equation there and that it's not obvious what that might mean
It's also not clear what being made in the image of God would mean given that by that point in the book
you don't know much about God except that you do know that
He uses
Logos to extract order out of chaos
that's about all you know, and that that's good and
So the proposition there as far as I'm concerned is that that's what human beings do
that's what we do and
and
That this is way more important than people think
that we are
co-creators of
Reality now you think well, do you believe that?
Well, let's let's let's think about that for a minute or two. It's like
You know the standard scientists they tend to think of human beings as
Materialist and deterministic. I
Don't think that works very well for consciousness. I don't think there's any evidence that it works as an explanation for consciousness at all
And I think so. I think consciousness is self-evident
I mean we certainly act as if it's self-evident, you act like you're conscious you act like all the people around you are conscious
They're not happy. If you don't act like they're conscious. That's for sure
you're not going to get along with yourself or your family members or
Society at large if you don't treat people like they're conscious
You're also not going to get along with any of them
Unless you treat them like they are active agents that have some role in determining their own destiny, right?
I mean God, you see that in two-year-olds, you know when they're already pushing for autonomy
and so we make these assumptions that while we have this capacity for autonomous choice and
I'm gonna split an argument into two parts here. The first thing is I don't think that we can be deterministic
because it looks like
neurobiologically that if you want to run deterministically like on habit
Which would be what?
Deterministically would be you have to practice and practice and practice and practice and practice and build all the machinery that allows you to act
deterministically and then there'll be a stimulus and the whole
Deterministic process will lay itself out but that doesn't happen unless you've built the machinery
So like if you're a tennis pro, you know, you're acting deterministically all the time because you don't have enough
Time to consciously decide what you're going to do when a ball is come you so fast
You can't actually see it properly
It's all reflex
but it's really complicated chains of reflexes and
You spent like ten thousand dollars building them and so fine and when you're driving your car you're walking
You're doing these things that you've practiced so well, well your deterministic, but when you can counter the chaos of the day
That's a whole different story
And so what consciousness seems to do actually is to act when deterministic processes
aren't at
hand
So and so what we could walk through that we say look look here - here here's one way of thinking about yourself
You're you're a clock and you're wound up and you
wind down
Mechanistically, but the clock mechanism has to be there for you to wind down mechanistically and unless you've practiced something a long time
It's not there so I don't see how determinism ISM can account for that
So here's an alternative and you can tell me if this is in keeping with your experience. So you wake up in the morning
Your consciousness re-emerges from the darkness in which it's been embedded like the Sun coming up
Just why consciousness has always been associated with the Sun
we're daytime creatures and we and we're
creatures of vision and so we identify
Consciousness within with the light with illumination with enlightenment you wake up in the morning. And what do you have in front of you?
Well, it depends whether you're excited or worried
But it doesn't it doesn't really matter because it's the same thing what you have in front of you
This is as far as I can tell is that you have a field of possibility
You have a field of potential you might wake up
And worry you think well, I have to do this or you know, this series of negative consequences might emerge and I have these
Obligations that need to be taken care of for the same reason duties, you know
tax bills that have to be opened before they turn into some sort of terrible monster or
Work work requirements that need to be done for the same reason to keep to keep chaos at bay
And that will run through your mind and if it's overwhelming if there's too much chaos in your life
You might wake up in the middle of the night and have all that running through your head
You have all these this potential of what could be
Manifesting itself in front of you and then that's that that can be very stressful. It can also be very exciting right because
The flipside of that obligation is opportunity. And so you see in front of you this field of potential that's opportunity
but what what what you see as far as I can tell with your consciousness is
the potential that could be
right you see a
sequence of
worlds that you have some
Causal
ability to bring into being
And and you act like that you think well
I have to do this because then this will happen or if I don't do this then this will happen and hopefully if you're
not too skewed
most of the decisions you make are
positive ones because you want to take the
Potential that's in front of you the chaos and you want to turn it into a reality
That's good
And most of the time you're going to assume although you may be tempted not to
From time to time that the best way to do that is to confront that potential
forthrightly and to deal with it in a positive and truthful manner and that
The hopeful consequence of that will be that well, even if you don't produce something good
It will be less hellish than it might have been right, but maybe you'll maybe you'll get lucky
because you're
focused and you're doing your best and
you're confronting what's there as potential and you turn it into something good and
then you can live with yourself properly and you don't wake up in the middle of the night and
Bemoan, your lost opportunities and your lost possibilities. And so I think that what we are as individuals are
spirits
that confront
the potential of reality and
Transform it into the actuality of reality as a consequence of our ethical decisions
That's what it looks like and I think that that's why
There's an insistence in Genesis that were made in the image of God because we're partaking in the same process
Continually and you know you think well, do you believe that well, huh, let's look at how you act I
mean
The first thing is you tend to think you your kids is full of potential and and
You tend to think of the world that confronts them as full of opportunity. I mean
Or full of potential for that matter the whole potential thing is very strange
Notion and we don't think about it much and I think it's mostly because we're materialistic. It's like there's nothing material about potential
It's not here. It's not here now
It's it's out there whatever that means in the future with no qualities whatsoever
Except our apprehension of it. It has no weight. It has no mass it has no has no being whatsoever
it's just what could be but we treat it as it is if it's more real than anything else what could be and
Then if we have children and they don't live up to their potential they don't take advantage of their opportunities
Then we're angry at them. We say you had this potential that you could have done something with and you didn't do it
and so that you've
Sacrificed your own potential by not taking advantage of this
opportunity and
you've made yourself in the world less than it could be and you're never happy about that not when you're dealing with someone that you
Love you're always
upset because you see very clearly that they are not being who they could be and you and you see
Very clearly that that's a downward path and it's definitely not something that you want for your children. Then you think too, well
What about how you treat other people use yourself? Well
Conscience is a good example of that
you let an opportunity go by so you have some potential that
manifests itself in front of you as a doorway through which you could pass and maybe you you forego the opportunity because you're
Faithless and afraid and I mean that happens to everyone but it doesn't mean that you're gonna let yourself off the hook for that
You know, if you look at older people and you ask them what they regret in their lives, it's not the opportunities
They took it's the opportunities. They could have taken and didn't and it's because
I believe that deep in their conscience part of our structure our deep deep structure
We have a known moral obligation to take what's offered to us in its full
Catastrophe
And to make the best of it and to do that
properly with our ethical choices and that we do not let ourselves off the hook if we fail at that and
then I don't believe that we can organize our human relationships without believing that because
if I believe you have no agency and no capacity for
Your own choice and your own...
I believe you have no ability to transform the future into the into the present into the into the reality of the present
I'm going to be you're going to react to that like it's demeaning and
Patronizing I have to treat you like a moral agent of worth. I have to do that to me
I have to do that to my kids
I have to do that to my friends and
If we do try to establish a community like a political community and we don't use that as an axiom
Then the political community is a bloody catastrophe. And so that's part of what makes me think that this sort of thing is real
It's like well, it's real enough so that it governs your relationship with yourself whether you want it to or not
It's real enough that it governs your relationship with your children and their and the rest of your family
It's real enough that if you don't build your political system with those self-evident axioms
Then you just get a catastrophic tyranny. It's like that's pretty real
So those are the self-evident propositions and so I've been talking to people and trying to remind them of this
you know because
We're in danger of losing this and we shouldn't be losing it because there's something about it. That seems to be correct
I think people are afraid of it and then they should be I mean one of the statements
with regards to my introduction was that my
Observation as a clinician was that no one ever got away with anything
And I believe that I've seen that because you'd make a mistake
Especially a conscious mistake and you think you've got away with it. You wait, it'll come back
years later
Something something you bent the fabric of reality in some manner and in the short term you got away with it, you know
no one noticed but that has consequences that unfold and
sooner or later that
Chickens come home to roost and sometimes it takes years if you're doing therapy with someone and they've gone off on a very bad
pathway to
Trace all the decisions all the way back to that one
Decision you made that you knew was wrong when you made it and you made it anyways
And then you forgot about it because you don't remember every decision you make and your life is going off astray in some terrible manner
I've been suggesting to people and this is and I'll close with this
first of all, you have this moral obligation because you have this potential in front of you and the hypothesis is that you should be
approaching that let's say with courage and truth and
transforming it into the best that you can transform it into because that's actually the world and
you do that locally you do that to the limits of your power and sometimes you don't have much power because
You're not that competent and sometimes you have a lot of power and you're very competent, but it doesn't matter
You have a certain amount of potential at hand and you?
can either transform it into the order that's good or you can
do the opposite and
Generate a little bit of hell right here and now and if enough of us do that
Then we get a very large amount of Hell right here and now and we've seen that multiple times
particularly in the 20th century with the
establishment of great
Totalitarian regimes that were based on nothing but lies that were as close to hell as anyone could possibly desire
short of metaphysical reality
But it's worse - it's not only I think that you're called upon
This is a responsibility
You're called upon to
act ethically in the
Face of this potential that confronts you so that what you produce is good
But there's there's there's there's a part of that. That's worse that it's that's more
Burdensome than that even if that's burdensome enough
Make a mistake bring something into reality. That shouldn't be there then it's there and then
It's there to plague you and it's there to plague the people around you and it's not gonna go away till someone fixes it so
that's a scary thing, but the other thing is is that
even if you
If you fail to take the responsibility that's laden upon you to use truth to structure
possibility properly then you leave a hole in the structure of being that you
Could have filled with something good and it doesn't just stay there as a hole
it's that you invite something that's terrible in to take its place and
That's what happens when people become bitter and resentful and cynical
because they've been hurt in their lives and they start to use deception and
They start to deviate from the desire to confront the potential that surrounds them properly and to make things better
They they look for revenge. They look to hurt. They they develop malevolent motives and then not only are you not
bringing into the world what could be good and
Sustaining, but you're inviting into the world what can definitely be
Hellish is the only ...
to properly
conceptualize it and so I think that
There isn't anything more
Meaningful or real than the idea of individual sovereignty and that
It's mostly predicated on not on rights but on responsibility
Which is where our cultural?
Conversation has gone wrong because we've been talking about rights forever. It's like you have a responsibility
you're you're given a modicum of
possibility to play with in your life to do something with to build something with and
What you build is dependent on your ethical choices
and
It's the sum total of those ethical choices that create the world and then I'll close with this
We actually believe this politically
because our Western systems which are quite functional are also
predicated on the idea that
You're sovereign
Well, what does that mean? What means the government has to respect your rights?
But like I said, we've talked too much about rights, there's more to it than that
the proposition is that
The state is blind and old and decayed and dead and that requires the vision and the truth of the living in
order to keep it on track and
so what you do to keep it on track is you consult the living each one of us as
sovereign individuals and the reason you do that is because of the proposition that
You could actually do that. You could open your eyes you could see what was in front of you
You could speak the truth and you could keep the ship of state
properly afloat and oriented in the correct direction and our entire society is
predicated on that idea as well and
So that's the responsibility, right?
And it's it's a burdensome and terrible responsibility, but I also think
given the fundamental
catastrophe of life and the fact that you have to deal with that without becoming embittered that you need a weight and a load of
responsibility
That's of sufficient magnitude
And worth
so that it balances the
fragility that characterizes you
You could make things better
You could reduce suffering in the world
you could act in a meaningful and truthful way and there would be nothing in that but good if
It was good that you wanted
and that's all at the bottom of what constitutes the self evidence of our
Equality before God our inalienable rights and
The requirement for the consent of the governed
Thank you very much
Thank You, dr. Peterson
We would now like to engage in conversation with dr. Peterson drawing on questions. We've received from many of you and
Joining with us now are two of my colleagues at the independent Institute
The first is Mary Theroux a senior vice president and Graham Walker who was executive director
Mary received a degree in economics from Stanford University as she's been chairman of Garvey international
co-founder president and CEO of San Francisco grocery Express and
Member the National Board of the Salvation Army as well as chairman of the Salvation Army here in San Francisco. And in the East Bay
Graham received his PhD in public law and government from the university of Notre Dame
he's been a professor at Catholic University of America and the University of Pennsylvania as
Well as the scholar in the social science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton
Mary do you want to begin? Thank you. Thank you. That was just terrific
We really appreciate your being here and you gave us a lot to talk about
I've heard you say that we humans are more sensitive to negative emotion than to positive
And in fact that we're tilted to negative emotion in terms of its potency
But the enormous popularity of your message where you cast a vision
that we can overcome problems and we can achieve lives of meaning and love and
Resiliency shows the tremendous hunger that exists for that positive alternative
In the realm in which independent operates
Politicians typically do employ a threat based narrative
So the world's going to end in ten years unless you give us control of the economy with a green new dough, right?
In which case it will certainly end in ten years. Absolutely
So as with your messaging
Independent cast the possibilities based vision, we produce publications and commentary and other things that it's positive
Solutions-oriented has an opportunity based narrative
emphasizing how human ingenuity
operating within a virtuous framework of the free market
Can overcome virtually every challenge including?
Improving lives and providing solutions to problems that governments can't or actually make worse
So my question is given your observation regarding the outside appeal of the negative
how would you advise us and indeed anybody in the audience who wants to counter that negative that threat based narrative and
Advance the opportunity
human valuing
Narrative well, that's a great question. I mean
there's an old old idea that you have to
rescue your dead father from an abyss and
That sort of associated in some sense with the Nietzschean idea of the death of God
And when every generation goes through its crisis of meaning, so the question is well, where do you find?
the spirit that revives and the answer is in the darkest possible place and
And see this is where I think that conservatives go wrong
My lectures well
Tonight wasn't particularly a classic example, but my lectures tend to be very dark. There was darkness in this one. I mean there
There there is a
inalienable reality of
Finitude and suffering that characterizes people's lives and it's not surprising that they become bitter they become embittered and resentful
And that has to be that has to be
forthrightly
Examined as
Deeply as possible
Before anything optimistic can emerge because you have to say look I understand
why
You're you feel the way you feel
but
Despite all that and all of that is a lot
The proper antidote is
the ethical way of life and
Not only is it the proper antidote because it's your duty which is another thing that conservatives stress. It's deeper than that
It's because it actually works
Ya know you need
You need a meaningful life
It's not optional because that combats the suffering and more than that if you lead a meaningful life
Which means to adopt responsibilities almost inevitably you actually make things better
And so you can take people down to the bottom of the abyss and you can say it's no wonder that you despair
given
your finitude but
There's so much possibility that surrounds you that
You can make something of that
regardless of its of
the reality of its horror and
you do that with
responsibility and people understand that and so
It it isn't just a call to make making things better. It's not a call to a utopia that's produced by a human imagination. It's
It's it's a... It's it's it's the insistence that
Without
The proper engagement in truth that your life will
Your life will degenerate and you will end up embittered and in hell and so
The conversation just hasn't been serious enough I would say and that's especially bad for young people, you know
One of the things I tell young people all the time
I'm not a very typical psychologist in this regard because I call it just like to Pat people on the head and say
You're all right. The way you are. I talked to Bishop Baron a while ago
I'm gonna broadcast this and he said that the Catholic priests were trained in the 1960s to kind of be accepting, you know humanistically
You're okay. The way you are, you know, and that's such rubbish
it's like
Not only are you not okay the way you are you don't think that anybody else is okay the way they are either
You're not, you don't think your children are okay the way they are like you love them and all that
But you don't want them to stay three years old their entire life you want them to
Expand and improve and become who they are. And so
Instead of telling young people that they're okay the way they are I tell them that
And it's a terrible message for them if they're desperate
You know, so let's say ten and percent of the people in my audience are young
Maybe they're young men just for the sake of argument and they're like not in good shape
They don't have any goals, They're drinking too much. They're watching pornography all the time. They've got no aim
they've got no structure in their life and they're just bloody miserable and the misery is
twisting them into
Malevolence because enough misery will absolutely do that to you
And then what are you gonna do and come along and say well you're you're okay the way you are
It's like that's the last thing they want to hear
It's like get your damn act together, you know
You got things to do and they're gonna be difficult and that there's a there's a there's a an echoing Christian message in there
I would say which is you pick up the
weight of your suffering
Voluntarily and you walk uphill with it and that not only gives you the meaning that you need in life in your life
To stop you from degenerating in a dangerous manner, but it actually makes things better
And so that that that all has to be part of it like I believe in human ingenuity
I think we can solve all the problems that beset us, but it can't just be
It has to be more than we can enhance material well-being. That's just what it tends to be now
It's not enough. And so and you get brushed off by the apocalyptic types
yeah, there's that that creativity that only comes from the individual consciousness and
it can't be simply reduced to some kind of a
Formula or a machine? It's it's mysterious in some way which is why I think your
Recourse to the archetypal structures of Genesis is so illuminating
But there was one thing you said about that that I just wanted to pursue a little bit if I may
The idea that we can't not operate like this is what's especially compelling in your portrayal
Yeah, exactly. Good luck precisely. That's the thing
That's so strange is that you know Nietzsche thought we could create our own values
Right that was his solution to the death of God, right?
but you can't because well Dostoyevsky figured this out right in crime and punishment, for example
You try breaking a moral rule
Especially one of your own. Mmm-hmm and then try convincing yourself that it's okay. It's like good luck with that man
You break a moral rule that's sufficiently deep
you'll traumatize yourself and you'll never recover and if you break one, that's you know, maybe just a
Medium-sized. Well, all that'll happen is you'll wake up at 3 in the morning
You know night after night
perhaps for years
Torturing yourself because of the mistake you made it if you could create your own values
You dispense with that in two seconds, you'd say well that was my decision. There's no fundamental meaning to reality whatsoever
I can do whatever I choose and I'm not gonna be guilty about it. It's like and the point is that's neither
Neither true nor functional. it's it's that's it's it's neither true nor functional
Yeah, and it's functional in a psychopathic manner
well
The closest people and people who are closest to be able to do that are psychopaths, but like their outcomes, aren't that great
They don't have they're not they don't do that. Well, despite what you read about, you know psychopathic CEOs, they don't do that
well and most people caught on to their tricks and generally they spend nomadic lives because they have to go from place to place because
People catch on to their deceit and you know, they're quite prone to suicide and and spontaneous emotional collapse
so no you
You have this moral law that you exactly yeah
But this is one way in which our position as being image bearers of God is a misleading
parallel insofar perhaps as
God uses his words to create bring order a create order out of chaos
And we can create order too by speaking truly the difference being that
We don't know
Whether there were any constraints at all constraining his choice at the beginning of the process
But we do know that we live within a context ourselves both
physically physically naturally as well as morally that constrains our choice we can either
Recognize our moral obligations as you said or try and elide them
When it's not successful
But we can try
And I just noticed one thing that seems a little odd you can tell me if to strike you as odd or not
Or maybe I'm missing something in an era when identity politics seems to be everything
And as you said a lot of post-modernism has devolved into this notion that there's nothing but competing groups with their different
Self-contained mindsets competing for power and what never the twain shall meet epistemologically and so forth
That's certainly the case and at the same time
Doesn't there seem to be coexisting with that a kind of?
mutated
Individualism, which is alike what you just mentioned of Nietzsche namely the idea that I can I'm an individual
I'm the creator of a meaning. I can use my own words or my own will to create my own identity
I'm not obligated to independent moral obligations. I create moral obligations
Yeah, how can this kind of mutate a toxic individualism coexist with identity politics?
Well, I say the things things that you cheat. What is it?
You can chase nature Oh with a pitchfork, but she always comes rushing back in right?
You know, if you if you one of the things I tried to do in maps of meaning
which was the first book I wrote was to write a description of what distinguished a religion from ideology and
One of the things that distinguishes a religion from an ideology as a religion takes everything into account
it's like well, there's a tyrannical element of culture, but there's also the benevolent element and there's the tyrannical element or the
destructive element of nature but there's also the creative element and there's the
Heroic element of the individual which would be embodied say in Christianity in the figure of Christ
But there's also the adversary there's always this balance. Yeah
With if you think everything is a social construct, so it's all social
Well, the individuality is going to creep back in somewhere and it does it in exactly the form
It's this very very childish form, right because it's so immature. It's so underdeveloped. It's like well, we're entirely socially constructed
Except at moment to moment We can determine our gender and by our own individual choice and everyone has to bow down to that
Yes, yes. Well, that's also what makes it so childish. Is that not only
Not only is it in the incoherent doctrine because you can't have it both ways
You're not socially constructed and able to choose your gender
Those things don't go together, but the idea that your identity now self-produced
Also takes precedence over the negotiation you have to have with other people about what your identity is going to be is
Really at the same development level
I would say as a two-year-old and I mean that I mean that technically because two-year-olds two-year-olds cannot
Take their own
Identity and integrate it with the identity of other children
they can't do that until they're about three and so it's so
It's it's so infantile that it's almost beyond imagination like epistemic solepcism
Meaning meaning I mean that the idea that only I exist that solepsicm is amiss so that yeah that I therefore
I know only what I know, but everyone else doesn't really exist. Everyone else is an illusion
I only am familiar with my own thoughts and the only true reality is the reality that I experience everyone
It's like except you can't live consistently with that and no one does well, but guess those aren't identities
It's this is another thing. That's so immature about it. It's like okay, you're gender fluid fine. Well now what?
I'm dead serious. I'm dead serious. Like what the hell are you gonna do with that?
you know like
Part of the reason you have gender roles and and of course their tyrannical and constricting, you know
obviously because everybody gets taken by culture and crushed into something, that's a
Compromise between their individuality and the rest of world everyone suffers from that
But you know, if you're if you're let's say you're straight and you're heterosexual
For sorry. Those are the same thing
Let's say you're heterosexual and you're monogamous and you're in a committed relationship so like all of a sudden you have an identity
Well, what's the identity? Well, it's easy
You get married?
You have children
You raise them together you tie your lives together. You try to you try to build something for the decades, right?
And that's an identity. It's a pathway forward. It's it's a way to be well, I'm gender-fluid
It's like, okay. Well pick your pronoun. It's like, okay. Well, what do you do tomorrow?
Well, I'm I don't know. I'm out there in no-man's land. You don't want to be in no-man's land. That's not good
You're off the beaten path you think well, I can go off the beaten path. It's like
You go off the beaten path and you just see how long you last
You're lucky if you're if you're a highly creative person and you're very disciplined and you have most of your life in
pristine order you might be able to risk a
Substantial deviation from the beaten path and managed to maintain your sanity
But if you're a disorganized person and you wander off the pathway of tradition you are in so much trouble
You can't even possibly imagine it there are things out there that you will encounter that you have
Absolutely, no defense against whatsoever. And so it's naive beyond
Comprehension it's like Well, I'm a new kind of gender. It's like
You've got 60 years to figure that out and then take
Fifty thousand years to even take a crack at it, so it's terrible
Mary did you have another question you want to ask? I think we can slip one in because I think one more you okay?
You talk about how dangerous it is to tell some
Young person whose life is messed up that they're just great the way they are with which I completely agree
But how do you reach a young person who's bought into the notion that life is meaningless?
Well, you're the first thing is you tell them why they think that
It's like they've got all sorts of reasons to think that it's like life is hard. It's it's it's a crucifixion
That's right. And so
It's no wonder they think that it's like okay fine. First of all, we're gonna take it seriously. Yeah, you're
suffering and adrift and you have your reasons but
so you take those reasons seriously, and you say despite that
Despite that there's more to you than you think and you know that too because you upgrade yourself for not
Manifesting it and you say to people well I ask people for example
Who do you admire?
Because that's the instinct for admiration is part of the instinct for imitation. It's like how do you admire?
Do you admire people who are completely irresponsible you admire people who can't take care of themselves. They can't even take care of themselves
Here's the most admirable person
Completely useless to themselves maybe even counterproductive just a bloody
catastrophe for their family and like
What would you call a social danger like no one admires that no one admires that it's like you start
Minimally, can you take care of yourself? At least that?
That'd be the first thing and then is there more than eyes there enough to you so that maybe someone else could rely on you
Now and then maybe maybe a number of people maybe your family
it could be a it could be the glue that holds them together and and
And mends them and then maybe there could be more to you than that. Maybe you could be
Someone for your community and god only knows how far you could go with that. Those are the people you admire
It's like well try that out
See what happens and start locally
Jung Carl Jung said this is one of my favorite Carl Jung
Quotes that modern man does not see God because he will not look low enough.
I Really like that. And so, you know, I've been telling the people that I talk to the same thing
it's like you have a certain amount of
Potential within your grasp
you may find what you have contemptible because you're not in a position of power this modicum of
Possibility that's been granted to you is beneath you and so you do nothing with it. And so you get nothing from it
You take that seriously you do the small things
You can the humble things that you can to put yourself together in that in those
tiny
Embarrassing ways that are real and if you do that enough
you'll
You'll will fortify yourself and that will work and you know, one of the things that's been unbelievably hardening to me
It's ridiculous really like
Normally now if I go out during the day
If I go to any city
I've been to like 150 cities in the last year and if I'm walking around on the street or in an airport
Someone will come up to me about every 10 minutes or so, and they'll say the same thing
They always say the same thing
They first of all apologize for bothering me and they're very polite
To all my interactions with people you'd never guess this from like my reputation in the press
but all my interactions with people in public are unbelievably positive and
the people will come up and say
You know, I was in this small domain of hell a year ago or six months ago, whatever
It is addiction. Alcoholism. I wasn't getting along with my family
I've been living with my girlfriend for five years and we were stuck. I didn't have any direction for my career
I was nihilistic, you know, I was whatever, you know, although different ways that people can
fall into a pit and and and and
Be miserable
said I read in your books or I watched your lectures and I decided I was gonna I
Was gonna try to put my family together
Or I was gonna I was gonna make a vision and pursue it or I was going to try telling the truth
just try one of these things and things are way better way better, you know
And sometimes it's a father and a son or sometimes. It's a son and a daughter
it's usually it's usually it's not often a daughter and a mother not so much but I
Mean if it's a pair of people
But or it's a girlfriend and a boyfriend and the girlfriend is very happy usually because her boyfriend has straightened up
Substantially and maybe they're getting married and like he's half civilized at this point
but
But but it's but it's it's an unbelievably positive thing to see and and it's a real thing
You know
it's like it's it's so interesting to watch the fact that all people have to do is put some of these things into practice and
All of a sudden that little modecum of potential that they had because they got humble enough to deal with it properly
Starts to expand and expand and like I believe and I do believe this and I think this is part of the Christian message
Fundamentally is that there's actually no limit to that expansion
You know because in some sense like we are this weird combination of finite and infinite like we're related to the infinite in some manner
obviously because the infinite
Exists and here we are and so we're related to it in some manner and I don't know what manner that is
But I don't know what the limits are
It's like if you were the best person you could be
No
truly if you
Decided to live by truth and to aim at the good and you really did that you put your whole heart and soul into it
Like you were like that's what you were staking your life on because you're staking your life on something who the hell could you be?
And no one knows, you know, you know perfectly
Well, you could be far more than you are and you don't know what the oppor limit of that is
And we certainly don't know what the upper limit would be
If there were lots of people doing that god only knows what problems we could solve, you know
There's lots of suffering and misery in the world
Plenty and it's no wonder that people get bitter
But God as you pointed out before, you know
We've got no shortage of ingenuity and possibility and if we were serious about making things less wretched than they are
Who knows what miracles we could pull off?
I
want I want to especially thank
Dr. Peterson again for his brilliant courageous and inspiring work and
We're particularly grateful to all of you for joining with us tonight
i Want to also especially thank the wonderful people who've made tonight possible
especially
my colleagues that the independent Institute
Our team is just fabulous and i thank you for that. I particularly want to thank my colleague Alicia Luthor
Who's our director of administration
For all of her supportive work and organizing and overseeing all that made tonight possible
Incidentally, there are copies that you may have noticed of 12 wheels for life outside signed copies
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Thank you and good night